Editor’s Survival Guide - Chapter 177

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Editor’s Survival Manual, Chapter 177

ep25. Unsealing (3)
The car driven by Jae-gyeom entered the Han River Bridge.
Like most people whose life revolves around Seoul, I’ve always enjoyed the view from crossing Han River bridges.
But today, the blue waters and the buildings beyond held little of my attention.
That’s because this ordinary Han River Bridge was the original form of the Fog-Shrouded Bridge where I had been trapped.
I was too busy committing the bridge’s unremarkable shape to memory.
Baek Sa-ra and I had been up on that arch.
Team Leader Cha had torn off the railing and turned it into a ladder.
My experience and memory were so vivid, yet reality bore no relation to it.
And this gap created by the Special Zone was always strange.
It was as I was looking at the Han River Bridge and the small island beyond it.
Zing—
My smartwatch chimed.
It was a call from the Management Bureau Situation Control Room.
—Agent, you’re enjoying your leave, I hope?
The light voice that followed.
—Your location’s showing as the Bridge and the Island, so we’re calling to confirm.
Half this call was obligation, and the other half was closer to a joke.
So I answered with a chuckle.
“Yes, I’m heading home safely.”
“Jae-gyeom is right here with me. No need to worry.”
Jae-gyeom interjecting while driving.
The Control Team agent laughed in response.
—Confirmed. Have a good rest of your leave.
Once the call ended, Jae-gyeom spoke lightly.
“It’s weird, isn’t it? The GPS overlap.”
It was indeed a curious phenomenon, as Jae-gyeom said.
Even when I drop into the Special Zone, GPS still locates me.
That’s why the Management Bureau could always pinpoint my location whenever I got pulled into the Special Zone.
But there were moments like this when they needed to verify directly.
Like now, when I was passing through the space that served as the original form of the Special Zone.
The GPS reading from the Special Zone matched exactly with the location of that original space, so from GPS data alone, they couldn’t tell whether I was in reality or had fallen into the Special Zone.
“Strange and unsettling at once.”
“Right. It’s like an alternate dimension openly showing its presence.”
“Now that you mention it…….”
I nodded at Jae-gyeom’s words and opened my mouth, then hesitated.
Jae-gyeom glanced at me sideways.
“Now that I mention what?”
“Nothing, really.”
I shook my head and changed the subject.
Jae-gyeom looked puzzled for a moment before quickly starting a different conversation.
I played along with his chatter, but part of my mind kept turning over the words I’d swallowed.
Now that he mentioned it, there was something like this in Nabbit’s short story collection.
In the near future, after most civilization had been destroyed, humanity’s only refuge was shelters.
But those final bastions were hopelessly cramped compared to the number of survivors, so the shelter administrators devised a plan to divide dimensions into multiple layers and distribute the survivors across them.
People couldn’t see or touch those from other dimensions.
As a result, the survivors neither got cast out of the shelter nor went mad from overcrowding; they shared space with people from other dimensions.
But even though divided dimensions meant no direct encounters, sharing the same space meant they still exerted large and small effects on each other.
Small things like a home’s interior changing to unfamiliar tastes, large things like a perfectly fine car suddenly being scrapped.
Discontent building up, people began sharing methods of killing their interdimensional roommates, and eventually another war began over control of the space—that was the story.
When I worked on it for publication, I’d thought it was just an interesting sci-fi premise.
Thinking about it now, it felt strangely unsettling too, so I unconsciously stroked my left arm.
* * *
“Wow, nice place you’ve got here.”
“Hold on, I need to clean up before you go inside.”
“It looks clean enough to me.”
Jae-gyeom spoke as he peered into the apartment from the entrance.
Just as he said, my home maintained the exact state it had been in the last time I’d cleaned it.
Still, since I’d left for over a month, I opened the windows to air the place out first.
“Did you get your phone back?”
“They just told me to buy a new one.”
“Oh, that might be better anyway. It wasn’t like you’d been using that phone for long.”
The mobile phone I originally used, I’d lost back in February at the Train Station.
And the one the Management Bureau had collected recently was one I’d made afterward—a new device I’d barely used in society for ten days.
So replacing the phone itself wasn’t much of a problem.
The real issue was that a text message to Acting Director Oh Tae-o had been sent from that new phone left sitting at my house.
So the Management Bureau took my phone, though they didn’t seem to have found out much of anything.
“Then I can just go out tomorrow and get a new phone set up.”
Jae-gyeom said as he stepped inside.
It was kind of him to put it so smoothly.
“Doesn’t it get inconvenient, following me around constantly?”
“It doesn’t bother me. Does it bother you?”
“No, I just worry about putting you out.”
When I met Nabbit last time too, Jae-gyeom waited nearby for hours.
It naturally weighed on me that one person’s entire time was being used up for my personal errands.
But Jae-gyeom seemed reluctant to accept this and asked back.
“Are you barely using your leave because of me?”
I didn’t deny it.
If I were moving around alone, I’d probably go out often.
But the Management Bureau wouldn’t permit me to go out alone, so I’d adopted the principle of only going out if it was truly important.
At my silent affirmation, Jae-gyeom shook his head.
“Come on, don’t worry about that. Go out often. I heard Lee Seob used to go home every weekend.”
“He has family to go to.”
“Even so. And Team Leader Cha apparently stayed at his house on weekends back then, since he’d go along with Lee Seob’s outings. You should just take your leave comfortably too.”
“Team Leader Cha?”
“Yes. Back then Team Leader was the one who’d accompany Lee Seob when he went out.”
Right, Lee Seob was in Kwon Mu-seop’s team, and back then Cha Si-eon was the junior member.
It was the same structure as now, I suppose.
More than that, he spent every weekend at Lee Seob’s house.
I’d already thought it odd how Lee Sol’s mother treated Cha Si-eon and Kwon Mu-seop so familiarly—so they weren’t just casual work acquaintances of her husband.
Indeed, without that level of trust, she probably couldn’t have greeted so calmly the people who’d kept her daughter confined for half a year.
“If you’d gotten married early, maybe I’d be getting homemade meals too.”
I laughed at Gwak Jae-gyeom’s flights of fancy and countered.
“That’s a misconception. My spouse and I might not even cook at home.”
“I’m fine with delivery too.”
Whether it’s home cooking or delivery, Gwak Jae-gyeom’s determined to eat at my place.
“Anyway, I like taking work off. So use your leave whenever you want.”
He doesn’t seem to be making that up.
Looking at Jae-gyeom, already settled into my place and half-sprawled on the living room sofa.
“By the way, you don’t have a TV?”
This guy really is just here to visit.
“I’ll give you my laptop. Watch it on that.”
I went to my room and took out the laptop I’d been using.
Thinking about it, I hadn’t turned this on in ages.
Worried about its condition, I pressed the power button.
Fortunately, it did turn on.
But instead of the familiar loading screen, a shattered display appeared.
“What the…….”
“What’s wrong?”
“The laptop’s crashed.”
A black background with white special characters scattered sparsely across it.
The screen frozen in that state, I tried tapping the keyboard haphazardly.
But the screen neither moved nor turned off.
As I stood there holding the laptop in one hand, Jae-gyeom got up and came over.
“Huh? Hey.”
“What?”
“This looks exactly like the ransomware that hit your company back then, doesn’t it?”
“The one you fixed?”
“Yeah.”
When I asked in surprise, Jae-gyeom nodded.
When I’d first been assigned to the Special Management Bureau.
While I was confined to a hospital bed, Jae-gyeom had visited my former company.
I’d heard that the company staff had been in a panic over the ransomware spreading through their computers, and Jae-gyeom, arriving at that moment, solved it.
He was saying my laptop’s condition was identical to what it had been then.
Now that I thought about it, I’d started neglecting this laptop right around that time.
“So it spread through my old publishing company work emails?”
“That would be the most reasonable assumption.”
“You can fix this too?”
“Sure, I’ve dealt with it before.”
Jae-gyeom nodded readily at my question.
A fix existed, but instead of acting, we stared at that broken screen for a moment.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the Special Zone, would it?”
“I wouldn’t know…….”
I’d really prefer if it didn’t.
As if pulling me down wasn’t enough, now tampering with my devices…….
After deliberating, we called the Management Bureau.
“Team Leader, I’m at his house right now…….”
Jae-gyeom called Cha Si-eon and relayed the situation.
Then he quickly hung up and told me.
“He says bring the laptop. Oh, but I ordered pizza…….”
Having just gotten out an hour ago, only to head back in, Jae-gyeom sighed.
“Guess we’ll have to go in first and come back out again.”
But removing this suspicious thing from my house was my priority.
We grabbed the laptop and opened the front door.
Then, as we passed through the officetel corridor.
Beep—beep—beep—!
My laptop began emitting a loud warning sound.
The piercing alarm, as if catching a thief, caught me off guard.
And the laptop was heating up like crazy.
The laptop screen flickered frantically between red and yellow.
As if it were about to explode.
“Back to the house!”
“What? Yes!”
Half-doubting, I rushed back into my apartment.
The moment we crossed the threshold, the warning cut off abruptly.
“What’s this…….”
The alarm wasn’t all that stopped—the screen returned to the black background with white corrupted characters.
The laptop body didn’t seem to be heating up further either.
I placed the still-hot laptop on the table.
Jae-gyeom called his team leader again, and I felt thirsty, so I headed to the refrigerator.
“Huh? What’s wrong with my phone?”
With the laptop acting up, Jae-gyeom’s phone was giving him trouble too, muttering to himself.
I opened the refrigerator door first.
But the bottled water we’d bought and put in wasn’t there.
I definitely remembered putting it in the fridge, but it had vanished.
…….
A bad premonition gripped me. I held my breath and rushed to the window.
And the view outside the window confirmed my suspicion.
……Jae-gyeom, try opening the front door again.”
Still standing near the entrance, Jae-gyeom heard my words and immediately reached for the handle.
Click—click-click—!
“How do I open this door?”
It was a simple numeric keypad lock.
From inside, the door opens when you push down the handle.
That’s how we’d left just a moment ago.
But suddenly the door won’t open, the phone’s dead, the laptop’s corrupting——
And outside the window, nothing but solid blue.
My apartment is on the 12th floor.
Normally I should see sky above and roads and buildings below.
But now there was only blue—nothing else.
Blue above, blue below, vague and endless.
What is this? Is this not reality?
I turned to look toward the entrance to call Jae-gyeom.
That’s when my eyes caught on the laptop screen on the table.
For some reason, that screen now displayed a sentence I could read.
「I can constitute the space.」

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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